Tips and Tricks for CYOAs

Tips and Tricks for CYOA Making
by Hexall/Hexalby

Disclaimer: The following is stuff I learned from my own experience making CYOAs. What worked for me may not work for you.

What is a CYOA?
While it may seem like an unnecessary question, knowing what you want to make is important to help you define the limits of your work. And limits here is being used in a descriptive sense, not a prescriptive one. Regardless, it is a pretty difficult question. Defining what CYOAs are, in the form we know them, is a tricky endeavor. The best I can offer is: “a tool for structured imagination;” meaning it is a series of rules, visual aids and text meant to generate fantastic images, scenarios, situations, etc.
As such, your primary duty as an author is to support and guide the imagination of others, much like books, movies and games do, but in a much looser sense. Contrary to other media, the author is not the final arbiter or sole ruler of the universe that is generated by the CYOA, but rather he acts as a tour guide, or chaperone. In particular compared to games, PnP or computerized, the rules of a CYOA are generally not meant to challenge, contain or direct the player, but to limit the amount of directions his imagination can go to a manageable number.

The Types of Players
I am not a great fan of broad generalizations, but I do recognize their usefulness as empiric tool. We can talk, of course, about the usual crunch vs fluff classification, but for me the most important difference in playstyle is how the player makes a choice. In this sense there are two groups:
	-Players that use the choices given to funnel their imagination
	-Players that use their imagination to determine their choice
The first will use the information you give them to build the world in which they will play, while the second will pretty quickly formulate their own world, and will use the information you give to flesh out the details and give themselves or their characters a place and time. The first will generally prefer stricter rules, while the second will prefer to have plenty of ways to break them. The first will prefer many different choices with relative few items per choice, while the second will prefer fewer choices overall, but with more items for each. The first will ask what happens if X and Y interact, the second will ask why Y and not Z.
While in practice there might be little visible difference, the experience is pretty different. This is not something you necessarily need to consider, but it may help you decide which direction you prefer to go in regards to crunchiness or details.

Themes
A CYOA lives or dies on its themes, at least in my opinion. As we said, a CYOA is a tool for the imagination, so the images the CYOA creates, through visuals and text, are paramount to its success. And in a piece of media that is held together by the willingness of the player to follow a certain imaginary path, the glue that holds the CYOA together must be strong enough to sustain that intention until the end. That glue is the theme. It can take many different forms: a location, a tone, a philosophical concept, a mechanic, a sentiment, a character, a specific interaction with a character, but it should permeate the whole CYOA. This of course does not mean that you absolutely cannot stray from the theme you have given yourself, but you should do it with the awareness that you are doing so, and adjust your work accordingly.

Structure and flow
Once again, the structure or flow of the choices that make up a CYOA is critically determined by its primary task: guide the imagination. As such, from what I experienced, the structure should reflect the progression through and generation of the imagined scene, meaning choices should be put in such an order that later ones build upon the older. You can broadly approach this in two ways: from the detail to the whole or from the whole to the detail. The first will initially put the player in a limited point of view, which then expands and progressively builds the world/scene/sentiment the CYOA wants to build; the second instead starts from a bird view of the world, and then lets the player descend down towards the details.
To make an example, let’s say we have two choices: weapon of choice (1) and room of a mansion(2). Starting from the first means leaving the player uncertain, for the moment, of what he is meant to fight, or even why does he even have a weapon in the first place; it leaves him uncertain and fearful of the unknown. Starting from the second gives him much more information on the situation he is in, thus the weapon’s choice will be much more focused. A 1-2 structure can work well for a horror CYOA, while a 2-1 structure can work well for an assassin CYOA.

Choices
It is not always easy to determine exactly what to put into a choice. How broad should the selection be? Or how narrow? Should this choice even be in the CYOA? It is especially tricky for “psychological” choices, where the author is almost certainly unable to provide for every possibility. For these questions I suggest considering the theme and the player. In our previous example, the choice of the weapon carries a lot of implications on the lethality of the player, or lack of, but also the time and place, the technology and culture, the means of the character, its social status, etc.
If it is a horror CYOA, does it make sense to give a BFG9000? Maybe, if yes, consider then the implications: if that is the weapon I am carrying, what kind of monster am I expected to fight? If it is an assassin CYOA, does it make sense to give a rolling pin? Maybe, if yes, consider what it means: is he infiltrating a place? Or making the murder seem like an accident? Or maybe he is just that poor?

Mechanics
Aside from more practical suggestions, the fundamental problem with building the functional structure of your CYOA is the degree in which the mechanics serve the CYOA itself. Rules are meant to restrict the player’s actions, but with the intention of offering them an environment limited enough that they can process it in full, not to arbitrarily block their path. This is a tricky balance to maintain, I realize, but it is important.
My golden rule is that every set of rules should have a purpose. A ranking system builds the expectation that eventually the player’s build will be compared to another one or to in-universe characters, if this is lacking then the act of interacting with the ranking system will feel hollow and wasteful. Similarly, a point-buy system builds the expectation that the player will be able to spend his currency-points on something valuable or impactful.
On a more practical note: Be wary of the amount of information you frontload; repeat, if possible, what they need to know to face a certain part of the CYOA. Don’t assume that the player will read every rule, so try to build a system that is as intuitive as possible to use. Try to minimize the amount of variables that the player needs to keep track of. Stagger the amount of point juggling and/or calculations they need to make; use, if possible, local currencies rather than currency-points that span several pages and are used for different things.

Writing
I don’t have too much to say on this, since the writing style of each of us is quite different from one another. Maybe the most important suggestion I can make here is to adapt the writing to the CYOA, and its themes, rather than the opposite. Remember that your job is to build the foundations of a fantasy that the player will then make his own, so don’t be afraid to leave details fuzzy and concentrate on what the text communicates in terms of interactivity. You can let images do the heavy lifting when it comes to descriptions, so dedicate the text to information that cannot be discerned from the visuals, like how would the player interact with the object/creature/person, what is their relationship with them and with the wider world, why is it here and not there, what is important about it and for the player specifically, etc.
For more practical tips: try to keep the text as light as possible, leave space between paragraphs, use short-ish sentences, consider splitting the text in columns if there is a lot of it at once; remember to let the player breathe.

Visuals
I am not a good Photoshop user, and generally I tend to use a very formulaic visual style, so I am not the best to advise others on this topic. There are much better authors than me at that. What I can say on this is to try and keep the art style as homogeneous as possible. If you are clever with the image size and background coloring, you can make pics that would otherwise stand out blend in with the others, but generally it is better to just use another image. As we said before, the art can do a lot of the heavy lifting for the writing, but this is not necessarily true for every single picture you may use. That said, do not stress yourself too much with finding the best art possible, there are only a few items in a CYOA, usually, that really need the right visual aid to work. Also, do not be afraid of making art-less sections, if having art would not make sense there, or would not help, or simply would prove to difficult to hunt down the specific images you’d need. If you are not sure on how to represent something visually, you can generally use landscapes or similar.